1. Smile. It’s one way to remind him that you care.

2. Make it obvious that you care. Tell him that he’s special to you, or tell him that you’re one of his fans, or give him an endearing nickname. You’re letting him know that he’s important to you.

3. Find out about him. Try to see the world through his eyes. That will help you appreciate what he’s dealing with every day.

4. Find things that you have in common. This builds your relationship with him. It will give you opportunities to talk together in a relaxed and warm manner.

5. Before giving directions or instructions, warm him up first. Have a quick, positive chat about a shared experience or interest. This will lower his defenses and he’ll be ready for your direction.

6. Give a direction then move away. Don’t stay to watch if he’s going to comply. He’s more apt to do as asked if you don’t watch.

7. Believe that he does not intend for bad things to happen. He didn’t wake up this morning and decide to have a terrible day.

8. Find a strength (something he’s good at) and let him use it.

9. Don’t leave him to fix his own problems or conflicts when they occur. You will need to fix problems for him or with him until he is ready to fix them on his own.

10. Stick with him through the worst of times. Let him know that your relationship trumps behaviour. No matter how bad it gets, he’s stuck with you.

If you do these things then he will start to feel safe with you.  Once that kicks in he’s going to pay attention to what you have to say.  He’s going to depend on you for guidance and support.  He will follow your lead.

Congratulations!  You’ve reached him.

Candee will be authoring ProPaks about relationships. For more information, sign up in the box to the right. 

As a profession, we have made an enormous commitment to adult learning. We recognize its importance, enshrining protected time for it on school calendars and, lately, spending a lot of money to ensure that there are more effective alternatives to the large group “sit and git” that is good for a common message and for inspiration but not for sustained learning. Coordinators in school districts frequently offer multiple small group sessions over the course of a year. School administrators timetable monthly or weekly professional learning community meetings so teachers will have the opportunity for truly job-embedded learning. Some schools manage to fund instructional coaches to provide individual support. And there are many who enjoy directing their own learning through technology, whether via social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook or Google+, or through participation in webinars and e-courses.

We try so hard and there are indeed moments of exhilaration – ‘aha’ moments when a new truth is revealed to us; collaborative moments when a change we’ve made as a staff has had a significant positive impact on student achievement. Still, we aren’t getting the results we need for the money, time and effort we have been expending. I think that’s because we have structural problems in professional learning that are independent of venue. Changing the number of people in the room and even the location of the room to a virtual space isn’t going to do it. Here are the 7 problems that I think need to be solved:

1. Beliefs affect actions. We know this but we don’t help people examine their beliefs, except maybe in sessions about cultural sensitivity.

2. Adults need differentiated instruction too. We readily accept the importance of differentiation for our students, but we treat adult learners as if they were all at the same starting point with the same interests and learning preferences.

3. Learning means there’s a change in attitude and/or behaviour. We have access to a huge body of research literature about successful processes of individual change, but we don’t use that information to benefit adult learners.

4. Environment and resources matter to learning. We take great pains to provide students with beautifully designed, thoughtfully developed resources utilized in an enriched classroom environment, but too many adults are still being subjected to death by PowerPoint slideshows as they sit in lecture halls.

5. We know which instructional strategies are going to have the greatest impact on learning thanks to educational researchers like John Hattie and Robert Marzano, yet too many of our professional learning sessions are still information dumps.

6. Implementation doesn’t automatically follow learning. We ensure that students have opportunities to practice new skills and transfer new knowledge, but when it comes to implementation for adults we tend to cross our fingers and hope for the best.

7. We are accountable for student learning. Whether we report in numbers or in words, we are responsible for knowing how a student is doing relative to the learning goals. Professional learning sessions don’t tend to have clear learning goals. We don’t know what has been learned or how the learning has impacted classroom practice.

I am committing the next 7 years of my life to improving professional learning experiences for all adults. I invite you to join me by doing two things:

1. Share your thoughts about what has worked for you in professional learning and what hasn’t. Use any medium you wish: respond to this blog post or to any of the seven I will be writing to elaborate on the problems I’ve listed above; reach me through Twitter, LinkedIn or Google+; send me an email by clicking the contact button on my website, or send me your phone number and I will give you a call.

2. Sign up in the box to the right on my homepage for further information about ProPaks, my answer to the 7 problems of professional learning.

I look forward to continuing the conversation.

I’ve always appreciated the thinking behind this idea –it’s Joseph Campbell’s concept of following our bliss step by step rather than trying to map it out in a five-year plan.

Unfortunately in the last half-dozen years, I’ve ignored the sage advice of Campbell and others and I have turned a blind eye to almost everything that interests me. Six professional books, two adolescent literacy programs, and an intense travel schedule have meant that I have been impersonating the rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, muttering “I’m late, I’m late” as I speed through life while staring at my calendar.

While I’m still writing and speaking (and happy to be doing both), I decided last week that it’s time to turn over a new leaf in the “following your bliss” category and I’m so glad I did. If I hadn’t, I would never have opened the links in the email I received from my friend Freda, and I would have missed learning about something that is doing a great job of capturing my attention and also giving me ideas for future work.

Freda’s son, Lucas, is keenly interested in, and knowledgeable about, transmedia (aka cross-platform storytelling). He blogs about his interests at Silverstring Media, a company “committed to exploring the power of stories…in whatever way best serves the narrative and engages the audience, regardless of media or platform.”

While the word ‘transmedia’ had me cringing a bit with memories of other graduate school terminology, I was hooked by Lucas’s focus on the power of story and, since I know him to be a brilliant and creative young man, I spent a couple of pleasurable hours reading his posts and following links.

If I have captured your attention, here are some differentiated starting points based on your interests and readiness:
If you’ve never seen an example of the art form, try The Time Tribe (a video teaser), Azrael’s Stop (a story for adults), or Inanimate Alice (four episodes, with teaching material).
If you are interested in the possibilities of transmedia in education, check out this virtual roundtable.
If you would like to offer input to a resource guide Lucas is hoping to write for teachers, see Lucas’s March 6th blog “Blueprint for a Transmedia Classroom” or join the twitter group at hashtag #tmlearn.

While I am genuinely interested in transmedia and its’ role in education, I have referenced Lucas’s work for an additional reason. I knew Lucas when he was in grades 4 through 8. Reflecting on the interests he had then and the work he is doing now, I see someone who has stayed curious about the world, who is aware of his own strengths, and who has bravely set out to do the work that captures his attention. It seems to me that helping ourselves and others find and follow their bliss is perhaps a significant need in our society and the highest purpose of 21st century educators. What do you think?

I worked with the S.M.U.S. staff for the first time in January. We talked about instruction and assessment as it applies to 21st century teaching and learning. The day after the workshop, several teachers were asked to speak on camera about what they had gained from the day. Before watching you might like to predict what you will hear. If you were asked what really matters to effective teaching and learning in the 21st century, or what a professional learning day on any topic does for you, what would you say?

“At the end of this lesson….”

Add this statement to the beginning of a goal and see whether or not the goal still makes sense. Anne Reeves gives a poor example –“At the end of this lesson students will take notes from a PowerPoint lecture” and a good one –“At the end of this lesson, students will explain how five or more local businesses have come into existence as a result of urbanization.”

“Hey Dad”

Imagine your students going home and saying, “Hey Dad (Mom/Uncle Joe…) watch me (or listen to me)….” What aspects of learning would a successful student be able to show off? This is a good test for catching vague terms and making sure you are identifying the kind of thinking you expect students to do. For example, “Hey Dad, listen to me understand the importance of the periodic table” isn’t as helpful as “Hey Dad, listen to me explain the importance of the periodic table.”

Whaddya Know

Ask yourself if students need meaningful knowledge of the subject matter in order to achieve the goal. If they don’t, the statement may be an activity. For example, “Students will explore the local art gallery in an upcoming field trip” is an activity statement; it does not specify learning.

Students Reflect

Put yourself in your students’ place and imagine reflecting on the goal statement at the end of class. Are you able to state specifically what you have learned and what you are still having difficulty with?

- Focus on what is to be learned today, not over the next several weeks. If a lesson is going to extend over several days, try to determine the learning focus for each day and make that your goal statement.

- Explain the learning in the goal statement, not the assignment or activity. Just because students complete an activity, that doesn’t necessarily mean they learned anything. Be careful if you are including the task as well as the learning in the goal statement –many students will pay more attention to the task than to what they are expected to learn.

- Use verbs to indicate the kind of thinking students will be expected to do. Words like ‘summarize’, ‘evaluate’, and ‘identify’ are much better than ‘understand’, ‘learn’, or ‘know’.

- Write the goal so that successful achievement of it requires grade-level work. If students can achieve without working at grade level, they aren’t being given the opportunity to work to high expectations and you can’t use the results of their work in your evaluations.

- Visualize what a successful learner will be able to do as a result of achieving the goal (success criteria) and think about how your students might demonstrate this criteria. Good goals are assessable!

Coming next week: 4 Tests to Determine Goal Quality

1. Human behaviour is goal-directed. When students attend to a clearly written goal and the information that supports its’ achievement, that information moves into working memory. When there isn’t a clear goal, students aren’t sure what they should be attending to and without attention there’s no way to store and process information.

2. Goals don’t just make initial learning easier. Because students are working with focus and purpose, they are also able to more readily transfer knowledge to familiar and unfamiliar situations both within and beyond the provided subject area.

3. When you know exactly what you want students to know, understand and be able to do, you will know what successful achievement looks like. That knowledge makes both differentiation and assessment very easy to do. If, on the other hand, you start with an activity and then try to differentiate or assess it without a clear goal, chances are good that the work will not be aligned with the most salient features of the learning.

4. Clear goals help students to develop the metacognitive awareness that is necessary for both critical and creative thought. This is because a good goal is focused on learning, rather than an assignment.

5. Feedback is considered one of the most effective ways of improving student performance. Good feedback has three stages: telling students what they are doing well relative to the learning goal; telling students what they need to improve relative to the learning goal, and using a combination of pressure and support so that students persist until success has been achieved. Feedback loses its potency when there is no learning goal.

6. Goals keep teachers focused on student thinking rather than student activity. I’ll say more about this in subsequent posts.

Coming next week –5 Key Principles of Effective Learning Goals